Customer Reviews:
 A Monumental Work of Historical Fur Trade Research August 31, 2008
This massive 2 volume work was well documented, well illustrated with drawings, photos & maps, indexed and referenced. This is not another book that summarizes the same old stories with the same old characters. Through nearly a 1150 pages Mr. Kent gives us a personal portal into the everyday life at Fort Ponchartrain and surrounding area in relation to it's time in history and sets the bar higher for every future historian to attempt to match it's quality & expansive approach. Common trade items of the day are shown & discussed such as the various imported fishing hooks--but also how they were knotted! Spears, kettles, bells, tools, crooked knives, furniture, crosses, silver, axes, tomahawks, beads, decorations, weapons, rings, medals, etc all backed up in great detail by countless manifest lists, diary entries, and other documents. Nearly every aspect of the lives of these soldiers, priests, traders, carpenters, blacksmiths, middlemen, and voyageurs is meticulously laid out for us through thousands of French and English sources from around the world. Never before has a work of this scale been done that comes close to this concerning the fur trade.
Yes the price is not cheap, but considering the warehouse of information gathered, any serious reinactor, historian, or just history buff would consider the result priceless.
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